Goodwood Museum & Gardens

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Hardy and Bryan Croom, tobacco planters from North Carolina, bought about twenty-four hundred acres here in 1834 and began a cotton and corn plantation worked by sixty enslaved people they brought with them. Arvah Hopkins, a New York merchant, took it over in 1857, ran it to eight thousand acres and held more than two hundred people in slavery on it. An English couple, the Arrowsmiths, bought it in 1885 and Mrs Arrowsmith stayed twenty-five years. In 1911 Fanny Tiers, a wealthy widow from the northeast, bought it and turned it from a working plantation into a country retreat, modernizing the house and grounds. Senator William Hodges followed in 1925, and Thomas M. Hood eventually left it for public use. That succession is the point of the place: one property carrying the whole arc of Florida land ownership from slavery to leisure. The main house is furnished with what the families actually left, and the grounds hold a carriage house, a skating rink, a swimming pool and formal gardens